Okay, we’re not doing that again.
I brought work home, because I needed to get this particular project done today.
A complex idea was floated at the production meeting on Friday. And for a variety of reasons, that complex idea would not work. However, I proposed a similar idea that is actually useful to what Diamond does and relevant to our present business.
Then a related idea got thrown into the mix.
My simple idea remains, well, simple. It takes an existing spreadsheet, performs some surgery, reformats it with HTML tags, and it’s done.
The related idea.
It takes a document that I produce every month that’s usually between eight and ten pages single-spaced. And triples its length. The reason? The document I’m starting with is extremely spare with data. This new document needs titles and item codes added to it. It also needed a complete rewrite for consistency.
So, I put in four hours on the document this afternoon, slapped it on the flash drive, grabbed a copy of the June Order Form for cross-reference purposes, and worked on it more tonight.
Technically, I had all day tomorrow to work on this document. And, yes, I’ll still need to do some work on it tomorrow — specifically, I need to write some intro and exit text, and link artwork to the article in the CMS. However, that’s a fifteen minute job at most. I can budget that into my day.
The two hours I spent on it tonight? The four hours I spent on it this afternoon? I didn’t have the time budget for that.
On the plus side…
After a sequence of nastygrams of increasing stridency, it was impressed upon me that I absolutely had to take some vacation time lest I lose it. In my two years of employment with Diamond, I have taken one vacation day.
Well, I’m still losing some vacation time due to arcane corporate rules.
However, beginning 6 o’clock on the 12th, I’m on vacation. I also get paid out for an additional twenty-four hours of vacation. And I’m forfeiting twenty-four hours.
They would have preferred if I had taken additional vacation time next week, but that was impossible. Without putting too fine a point on it, the comics industry would have collapsed had that happened. You think I joke. I don’t. Not one bit.
That’s a round-up of my work day.
Fortunately, I got a lot of reading done on the train. Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, which reads very quickly. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from the book, but it wasn’t at all what I got. I’m still processing this. I will say that I was captivated by Auster’s prose style, I found some passages of the book (particularly a lengthy conversation that begins about three-quarters of the way through the book) emotionally forceful (and, at times, wrenching). I have to ponder this some more. It’s very good, and not at all what I thought it would be.